Ravens Shadow 02 - Tower Lord (27 page)

The smuggler pocketed his new earnings then waved a hand at two of his men, nodding at the wiry man. They hauled him upright, dragging him off to the dark recesses of the warehouse. “I’m grateful for the business, but he shouldn’t have told you my name.”

“I’ve already forgotten it,” the woman assured him.

◆ ◆ ◆

The smuggler’s vessel was little larger than the river barges Frentis remembered from childhood, but with a deeper hull and a taller sail. The crew numbered only ten men besides the captain, moving about their tasks with quiet efficiency and none of the ribald chatter of the merchantman’s sailors. They were pointed to a small section of deck near the prow and told not to move from it, meals were brought to them and none of the smugglers attempted to engage them in conversation. It made for a dismal voyage, unleavened by the woman’s unending voice and a thick bank of fog greeting them halfway across the Erinean on the fourth day out.

“I’ve only been to your Realm once,” the woman said. “This must have been, oh, a century and a half ago. The scryers had picked out a minor noble who was likely to scheme his way to Kingship in a few years. It was a fairly easy kill as I recall, the man was a pig, ruled by his appetites, all I had to do was play the harlot. I killed him before he could touch me, of course. A single punch to the centre of the chest, a difficult technique I’d been trying to master for years. It was odd, but when Janus started his rise several decades later, the Ally gave no instruction for his death. Seems your mad king fit his plans perfectly.”

The fog began to lift in the early evening of the seventh day, revealing the dark mass of the Realm’s southern coastline a few miles off the port bow. The captain ordered a change of course, the small ship tacking towards the west. Frentis kept a close watch on the misted shore until a familiar landmark came into view, a free-standing column of rock nestled in a narrow cove.

“Something of interest?” the woman enquired, sensing his recognition.

“The Old Man of Uhlla’s Fall,” he said.

“Meaning?”

“We’re about thirty miles east of South Tower.”

“Can we land here?”

The Wolfrunners had spent the months prior to the mustering at South Tower chasing smugglers along this coast, and he knew the channel surrounding the Old Man was far too narrow for a ship, but an easy prospect for the smuggler’s rowboat. He nodded.

“The captain first,” she said, moving towards the steps leading down into the hold. “I’ll see to the lower deck.”

For all his ruthlessness and impressive physique the captain proved a feeble opponent, barely managing a parry with his sabre before the short sword took him in the chest. The first mate was a tougher prospect, fending him off with a boat hook for several seconds, calling for help in between voicing curses in a language Frentis didn’t know. But curses and courage availed him nothing. He died hard but, like the rest of the crew, he died.

◆ ◆ ◆

“Why is it called Uhlla’s Fall?” the woman asked. They were on the bluffs overlooking the cove, the rowboat abandoned on the shingle beach below. Beyond the Old Man the smugglers’ ship ploughed a steady course towards the rocks beneath the cliffs, the tiller having been lashed in place by the tightest of the woman’s knots.

“Never thought to ask,” Frentis said, not caring that she would sense the lie. Caenis had told him the story, the cove had been named for a woman, lovelorn when her man was called to sea in service to some forgotten king’s war. Every day she would climb the Old Man’s treacherous flanks to stand on the summit and watch for his return. For weeks then months she climbed, through sun and rain, snow and gale. Then one day his ship hove into view, and when she could see him waving from the prow, she cast herself from the Old Man, finding death on the rocks below. For he had been untrue to her before he sailed, and she wished that he witness her end.

They watched the ship carry its lifeless crew onto the rocks, the hull splintering with a booming crack, the flailing sail dragged into the waves by the swaying mast. It was already half-sunk when they turned away. Night was coming in fast and a stiff breeze brought the sea’s chill to sting at their faces.

“Is your face known in South Tower?” the woman asked.

This time his reply was truthful, “I doubt there are any who would recall it.” With Vaelin Al Sorna in attendance when the King’s grand army gathered for invasion, who was likely to remember any other brother of the Sixth Order? He cherished all his memories of Vaelin but to stand beside him in a crowd was to know what it was to be invisible.

The journey to South Tower took the rest of the night, the woman having no desire to linger near the site of a shipwreck sure to attract salvage hunters before long. The sun was rising over the rooftops of the town by they time they paused to rest. South Tower was walled all around, the structure that gave it its name rising above the other buildings, a slender crenellated lance reaching into the morning sky. They entered via the western gate, still man and wife. He noticed she seemed to have forsaken all other guises and wondered if she had come to believe it was true.

The guards on the gate were thorough in searching them, finding them weaponless, their swords having been concealed in a grassy mound a mile away, and possessed of just enough coin to permit entry. One of them questioned the woman’s curious accent but Frentis told him she was from the Northern Reaches which seemed to satisfy him. They were allowed entry with a stern warning that vagrancy was not tolerated within the walls and they had to be gone by the tenth bell if they failed to find a lodging.

The South Tower from which Frentis set sail six years before had possessed all the bustle and noise of a thriving port, the quay crowded with ships waiting to carry the army across the Erinean. This was a quieter place, the streets free of the laden carts and hawkers he remembered, sloping down to a harbour where at most a dozen ships were berthed.
No more silk, no more spices,
he thought, recalling the colours and scents of the market.
Janus cost us more than just blood.

They found an inn near the tower precincts and ate a meal served by a plump woman who fussed around them with an energy born of having little else to occupy her time. “The Northern Reaches you say?” she gushed at the woman. “Long way from home, deary.”

The woman clasped Frentis’s hand, caressing the back of it with her thumb. “I’d have travelled the whole world if he’d asked me.”

“Aww, aren’t you the loveliest. It was all I could do to walk across the room for the bugger I was shackled to.” Their heart-warming story earned a free helping of apple pie and a discount on the room.

There was no using that night, she sat on the bed, silent and immobile whilst he stood by the window watching the street. There was a tenseness to her he hadn’t seen before, a wariness to her gaze.
She doesn’t know what’s coming,
he decided.

The realisation earned him a stern look of rebuke, but she held off on flaring the binding. She rarely hurt him now, and there had been no repeat of the intense scrutiny from the wineshop in Marbellis.
She thinks me hers completely,
he thought.
Like a dog whipped to the perfect pitch of obedience.
His hands burned to explore the scar again, feel the smooth, healed flesh that broke the pattern. He kept the imprecation in his mind as quiet as he could, but never let it falter:
Grow!

The moon had risen by the time a shadow played across the cobbles on the street outside, its owner unseen and moving with an unhurried fluency. Frentis turned to the door and the woman rose to her feet. For the first time he could remember they were unarmed and wondered if it was by accident or design.

There was a soft knock on the door and the woman nodded at Frentis to open it. The man standing outside was equal in stature to Frentis though at least a decade older, with sharp but handsome features, his black hair swept back from a smooth forehead. He was dressed in plain clothes and sturdy boots, scuffed from many miles of travel. Like them, he was unarmed but Frentis knew a warrior when he saw one. It was plain in the set of his shoulders, the way his green eyes took in every detail of the room in a single glance, lingering first on Frentis then fixing on the woman, instinct finding the greatest threat.

“Please come in,” the woman said.

The man entered slowly, keeping a good two arm’s lengths from the woman and standing close to the window.

“He fears us, beloved,” the woman observed as Frentis closed the door.

A flicker of anger passed across the man’s well-made face. “I fear nothing but the loss of the Father’s love,” he said, the accent cultured but clearly Cumbraelin.

The woman gave a soft sigh of disgust, but kept any ridicule from her tone. “You have a name?”

“My name is for the Father to know.”

Frentis had heard this before, when they had been chasing after those child-stealing fanatics in Nilsael. They had been led by a priest, excommunicated by the Church of the World Father for heresy but still a priest in his own mind, crying out his prayers in defiance before Dentos put an arrow through his eye.

The woman turned to him with a raised eyebrow as she sensed his remembrance. “He’s a priest,” he told her. “They give up their birth names when they take their orders. The church gives them a new one, known only to them and their god.”

A fresh curl of disdain twisted the woman’s lips before she forced a smile at the priest. “I assume great promises were made in return for your assistance.”

“Not promises, assurances.” The man became agitated, a red flush creeping into his cheeks. “Proof was given. You do the World Father’s work. Is this not so?”

Frentis could tell the woman was suppressing a laugh. “Of course. Forgive my testing words. But we have to be careful. The, ah, servants of the World Father have many enemies.”

“And different faces, it seems,” the priest said in a soft murmur.

“I was told you would have word,” the woman went on. “Of Al Sorna.”

“He was in Varinshold a month ago. The heretic King sent him to the Northern Reaches as Tower Lord.”

“I was given to understand there was a stratagem. Something either fatal or damaging.”

“There was. The results were . . . unexpected.”

“They usually are where he’s concerned.”

“Steps have been taken. The Reaches are not so far.” He produced a small leather wallet, placing it on the bed and stepping back.

The woman reached for the wallet and briefly leafed through the contents. “My list is complete,” she said. “We have an appointment in Varinshold.”

“Another name has been added. Although this is a task well within my skills, the Messenger insisted it be left to you. The Tower Lord of the Southern Shore keeps an efficient household, but there are occasions when he makes himself vulnerable.”

The woman extracted a sheet from the wallet, a block-printed image of a white flame on a black background. Frentis knew it well, the fanatics the Wolfrunners hunted would deface the homes of the Faithful with it after killing the parents and stealing the children: the Pure Flame of the World Father’s Love.

“I was told to tell you that the Fief Lord alone is not enough,” the woman said. “The whore has to die too.”

His gaze tracked from her feet to her face, eyes bright with enmity and voice heavy with righteous conviction. “All whores have to die.”

She moved in a blur, appearing in front of him, her face inches from his, hands open in clawlike readiness.

The priest took an involuntary step back before mastering himself.

“When I see you again,” she said. “Perhaps I’ll arrange for you to meet this god you’re so fond of.”

The priest’s gaze shifted between them and Frentis had a sense of how threatening they must appear; her fury and his stillness.
He has no notion of what we are,
he realised.
No clue as to the true nature of his bargain.

The priest moved to the door in silence and left without a word.

“Go and kill that sow downstairs,” the woman instructed. “We made too great an impression on her.”

◆ ◆ ◆

“Your realm is an insane place,” she commented the next morning, watching the Tower Lord of the Southern Shore and his lady hand out alms to the poor. There were only two South Guard in attendance despite the large number of beggars lined up outside the tower gate.

“In Volaria,” she went on, “no-one goes hungry, slaves are no use when they starve. Those freeborn too lazy or lacking in intelligence to turn sufficient profit to feed themselves are made slaves so they can generate wealth for those deserving of freedom, and be fed in return. Here, your people are chained by their freedom, free to starve and beg from the rich. It’s disgusting.”

There weren’t always so many,
he thought but didn’t say.
But I was one of the few, even though I never begged.

They took some rags from a pair of drunken vagrants found passed out in a dockside alley, draping the stinking garments over their own clothes and veiling their faces with scrapings of dirt and threadbare cloth. The plump innkeeper’s kitchen had supplied two knives of good steel, freshly sharpened and well hidden beneath their rags.

The Tower Lord stood next to a table piled high with clean clothing, greeting each stooped unfortunate with a smile and a kind word, waving their thanks away. His lady looked to the children, handing out sweets or guiding them and their mothers, if they had one, to a secondary line headed by a pair of grey-robed brothers from the Fifth Order.

Grow
,
he implored the itch as they joined the line, shuffling ever closer to the Tower Lord. But there was no answer from the itch, not now and not last night when he held a pillow over the plump woman’s sleeping face.

“See to the guards,” the woman whispered. “The generous fellow is mine. Oh, how I despise hypocrisy.”

Grow!

The Tower Lord’s face was vaguely familiar, though Frentis couldn’t conjure his name. Had they met during the war? A Sword of the Realm somehow spared the slaughter to return home to Lordship and charitable pursuits? He greeted every unfortunate differently, free of stock phrases or forced conviviality, some even by name. “Arkel! How’s the leg? . . . Dimela, still off the grog I trust?”